PARTISAN INFORMATION ECOSYSTEM, PART I

To begin this posting, a word in support of the Pew Research Center.  What a service for the American people.  It is a nonpartisan think tank or “fact tank” as it refers to itself.  Headquartered in Washington, D.C., it publishes information over various issue topics, i.e., social issues, public opinion, and demographic developments within the US and the world in general.  Also, it reports on media and its content and provides overviews of empirical studies from the various social sciences.

          It is organizationally funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and has been providing the general public with insightful and timely research reports since the 1990s.  For those unfamiliar with the Pew Charitable Trusts, it is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organizational arrangement that funds various nonprofit entities like the Pew Research Center.  The Center is also funded by the Templeton Foundation.  To illustrate its work, there has been a series of studies supported by the Center on the issue of polarization.  One such effort is highlighted in this posting.[1]

          Robert Faris, et al., looked into the 2016 presidential election, found various actions by rightwing actors that constituted what the study calls “right-wing ecosystem,” affecting the results of that election.  The ecosystem includes the Fox News setup but also has an array of other contributors as this posting indicates.  Most of that activity relative to the 2016 election revolved around what the Center study calls “two chief dynamics” and, as such, provides two lessons for future elections.

          The two dynamics targeted the Clinton Foundation.  The first dynamic aimed at setting an effective public agenda.  In part, this dynamic was nothing new; it consisted of opposition research.  That is, it consisted of tough partisan investigation, reporting, and messaging of information aimed at portraying Clinton and her campaign in the worst way.  What made it somewhat unique was how thorough or deep it was as well as how far back their research went.  Interestingly, this effort began before Trump became part of the story.

          This tale seems to have begun with the publication of the book, Clinton Cash, a scurrilous account of donations to the Clinton Foundation and speaking fees to the Clintons by moneyed interests in exchange for public policy enactments or proposals.  The book was written by Peter Schweizer and published in July 2016.  Here’s the Amazon’s advertising blurb for the book,

In 2000, Bill and Hillary Clinton owed millions of dollars in legal debt. Since then, they’ve earned over $130 million. Where did the money come from? Most people assume that the Clintons amassed their wealth through lucrative book deals and high-six figure fees for speaking gigs. Now, Peter Schweizer shows who is really behind those enormous payments.

… Schweizer [in a previous best-selling book] detailed patterns of official corruption in Washington that led to congressional resignations and new ethics laws. In Clinton Cash, he follows the Clinton money trail, revealing the connection between their personal fortune, their “close personal friends,” the Clinton Foundation, foreign nations, and some of the highest ranks of government.

Schweizer reveals the Clinton’s troubling dealings in Kazakhstan, Colombia, Haiti, and other places at the “wild west” fringe of the global economy. In this blockbuster exposé, Schweizer merely presents the troubling facts he’s uncovered. Meticulously researched and scrupulously sourced, filled with headline-making revelations, Clinton Cash raises serious questions of judgment, of possible indebtedness to an array of foreign interests, and ultimately, of fitness for high public office.[2]

Apparently, the book does bring up verified decisions by Hillary Clinton that did favor various sponsors of her husband’s speaking engagements – at hefty fees – but the evidence reveals only questionable timing.

          Here is how a Newsweek review of the book summarizes the book’s reportage of what actually happened,

The book contains many more lurid examples of Bill and Hillary doing things that look bad—from Bill taking juicy speaking fees from a major investor in the Keystone XL pipeline while Hillary's state department reviewed the pipeline deal, to the Clinton Foundation accepting donations from a Swedish mining investor who more or less financed a coup in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

None of these actions are illegal. And it's not even clear if they're related. The rooster doesn't cause the sun to rise, but this is the thrust of Schweizer's argument. He never proves any laws were broken—in fact, he practically begins the book by hedging his accusations: "I realize how shocking these allegations may appear. Are these activities illegal? That's not for me to say. I'm not a lawyer."

Indeed not. Nor are the vast majority of American voters. And this fact is what Schweizer is counting on, presumably, because, while he points out many instances of Hillary and Bill Clinton doing things that look bad, he doesn't include any instances that rise to lawbreaking.[3]

What added to the effect of this dynamic (including publishing the book), Steve Bannon and his publishing interest, Breitbart News, proceeded to produce and distribute a film version of the book.  But of interest, the book was released months before Trump became the Republican candidate. 

But more calibrated was the release of the film and calls for Congressional investigation of the entailed charges to coincide with the usual bump a party convention would receive after its conclusion.  All of this was further coordinated with a well-organized email release to highlight the film.  The rightwing media ecosystem held back the story from public release until the mainstream media took up the story.  Those in that broader media platform played an essential role in “spreading the word.”  They in effect legitimized the story and, in turn, it became part of the public discourse.

How can public or private policy address this disruptive development – a development that, in effect, spreads as truth information concerning unfounded, illegal behavior?  One challenge is:  any public policy must not be inconsistent with First Amendment rights of free speech.  The Center opines that such developments needs to be met by a “highly vigilant professional press.” 

Yes, the press today is being hacked (information the Center added to the report as relevant) and such overviews call for serious surveillance which, in turn, depends on time-consuming efforts on the part of editors.  But the republic’s future seems to depend on the press to inform its readers and viewers as to such efforts as exemplified by the Clinton Cash case.  Sure, if an editor receives what is called an “exclusive” from a source such as Schweitzer painting a public figure, such as Clinton (either one), negatively, that will deserve an editor’s attention.  But that is where the interchange begins.

The Center’s summary states, “Tracking down the funding and sponsorship of Schweitzer’s research, and developing an investigative story about who is behind this assault and why it is being launched, is harder. It is, nonetheless, the fundamental professional responsibility of the press if it is to retain its unique role.”[4]

So, this is the first dynamic that the Pew Research Center offers in its related study.  The next posting will look at the second dynamic, the role of propaganda and misinformation.

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[1] Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler, “Partisanship, Propaganda, & Disinformation: Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Library (n.d.), accessed August 19, 2020, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/76a9/3eb0bed8ff032c44186678c5279f20cc5ff8.pdf?_ga=2.230250332.1151241653.1597869609-1463880478.1597869609 . 

[2] Amazon (online marketing statement), “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich” – book title, (n.d.), accessed August 20, 2020, https://www.amazon.com/Clinton-Cash-Foreign-Governments-Businesses/dp/0062369296 .

[3] Taylor Wofford, “Everything You Need to Know about ‘Clinton Cash,’ Newsweek, May 1, 2015, accessed August 20, 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/everything-you-need-know-about-clinton-cash-327694 .

[4] Robert Faris, et al., “Partisanship, Propaganda, & Disinformation,” 130.

VARIED AND NOT

 

This posting picks up on the notion that the current polarization bedeviling the nation’s politics is not felt the same across the political landscape.  That is to say, at least in one of its aspects, Democratic party members and Republicans view the functions of their respective parties differently and that is because their constituency arrangements vary.  One has a “57 variety” feel to it; the other has a monolithic feel to it.

          The Democratic Party has set upon itself the aim to represent the interests of a large array of groups.  These include liberal whites, African Americans, Latino/as, Asians, most labor groups, and in general, low income groups and their advocates.  They do have religious groups supporting them, but they are not from one religious’ tradition.  Their advocates include Christians, Jews, Muslims, even atheists and Buddhists and reflect the more liberal theological tradition.[1]

          But here the sorting becomes a bit complex.  Democrats are sorted, in part, among whites that are not psychologically bound to traditional religious values.  But in terms of non-white groups that they attract, they include traditionally oriented blacks and other immigrant groups, that attach themselves to fairly strong community-based allegiances. 

In general, many in this latter group hold conservative beliefs and often find it stressful to accept the liberal, Democratic agenda.  They stick to the Democrats because of their repulsion of the Republican Party and its policy positions. This includes positions regarding many issues that affect these minorities in negative ways, such as the Republican party’s aversion to public services, such as in education, or its immigration policies.[2]

The Republican Party represents the interests of one basic group – white voters as they define themselves as an identity group with a strong subgroup, fundamentalist Christians.  Within this group of people, in inordinate numbers, there are businesspeople, who are generally attracted to the party’s conservative, pro-business agenda.  For example, the party has consistently stood against business regulations and taxes.  It also has a strong aversion to social public policies and instead favors market solutions.

Due to these distinctions, two very different party makeups have emerged.  The Democratic Party is more of a coalition of various elements and the Republican Party equals sameness.  Ezra Klein reports,

It means [for Democrats] winning liberal whites in New Hampshire and traditionalist blacks in South Carolina.  It means talking to Irish Catholics in Boston and the karmically curious in California.  Democrats need to go broad to win over their party and … they need to reach into right-leaning territory to win power.  Republicans can afford to go deep.[3]

To support this distinction, Klein cites the contextual information that Americans generally consider themselves conservative instead of liberal (35% vs. 26%).  Yet, three-quarter of Republicans say they are conservative and only half of Democrats consider themselves as liberals.[4]  This betrays two important facts about American politics.  One it tends to be conservative and the polarization is better defined on the right.  It is the conservative voice that has the more targeted message in that it is less diluted by mixed motivations.

          How does this dissimilarity manifest itself in day-to-day politics?  Matt Grossman and David Hopkins in their book, Asymmetric Politics, study this question.  Generally, according to them, the Democratic Party, in that they are the more arrayed, factious party, finds commonality through a set of policy positions or goals.  The Republican Party, on the other hand, finds commonality in a binding ideology which is more abstract and generally phrased in their rhetoric.

          Republicans, consequently, have less interest groups expressing support for the party (about half as many as the Democratic Party has) and in their pronouncements, such as in debates, they tend to cite their ideology or principles at a much higher rate.  Democrats cite the various groups that support them, highlighting these groups’ interests and how the party’s policy positions support those interests.  Interestingly, this encourages them, the Democrats, to support compromise more readily than Republicans are but are more prone to expect results.[5]

          But an irony appears when it comes to the current state under a Trump administration.  While conservatives, as mentioned above, tend to be more ideological, they seemed malleable to the drifts of Trump’s rhetoric that aim to accommodate different audiences.  Klein reports that among conservatives, what was most important was not the offenses the president’s words have been to their ideology – or even Trump’s support of their ideology – but in how Trump defended them as an identity group or how the president defended their identity.

          To support this contention, Michael Barber and Jeremy C. Pope, in a recent academic article, provide evidence of how Trump supporters accept the diverse messaging the president espouses.  In their study, respondents who identified with Trump, were disposed to pick up on Trump’s cues to align their opinions to match his.[6]

          The Congressman, former Republican, Justin Amash, puts it well,

A lot of Trump Republicans have this mindset that they have to fight this all out war against the left.  And if they have to use big government to do it, they’re perfectly fine with that.  So when I go to Twitter and talk about over-spending or the size of the government, I get a lot of reactions now from Trump supporters saying, “Who cares how big the government is”, or “Who cares how much we’re spending as long as we’re fighting against illegal immigration and pushing back against the left.”[7]

The message relevant to the polarization issue is that its parameters have transcended its original motivating force among those of the right.  It now has become its own self-consuming end. 

A civics teacher who wishes to portray in his/her classroom the current political arena, therefore, needs to deal with certain complexities that do not promise to become easier anytime soon.  Probably no aspect of that grand contest is its emotional evolution that is still in the making and is changing as the day-to-day political aspects of the nation change. 

For example, the current coronavirus challenge has added a whole new layer to what is found divisive among Americans.  It has gotten down to whether to wear a mask or not has become political.  And this all-encompassing passion for Trump has its own media outlet, Fox News, which will be addressed in the next posting.

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[1] “Theological liberalism, a form of religious thought that establishes religious inquiry on the basis of a norm other than the authority of tradition.  It was an important influence in Protestantism from about the mid-17^th century through the 1920s.”  - - “Theological Liberalism,” Encycloaedia Britannica (n.d.), accessed August 17, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/theological-liberalism .

[2] Jonathan D. Weiler and Marc J. Hetherington, Prius or Pickup:  How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide (Boston, MA:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018).

[3] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press, 2020), 231.  The general identification of issues in this posting can be attributed to this source.

[4] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized.

[5] Matt Grossman and David Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics:  Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 2016)

[6] Michael Barber and Jeremy C. Pope, “Does Party Trump Ideology?  Disentangling Party and Ideology in America,” American Political Science Review, 113 (1), February 2019, 38-54.

[7] Jane Coaston, “Justin Amash on Trump, Impeachment, and the Death of the Tea Party,” New York Magazine, July 3, 2019, accessed August 17, 2020, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/3/18759659/justin-amash-trump-impeachment-gop-tea-party-republicans .  This article is the reporting of an interview with Justin Amash conducted by Coaston of Vox.  In this article, Amash, a Tea Party product, offers a fine summary statement of the natural rights view:  “The purpose of government is to protect people’s rights.  And Congress should serve as a deliberative body that ultimately reflects the will of the people through their representatives.”  Yet, elsewhere he cites his allegiance to federalism but restrains that reference to the structural aspect of that construct, not its processes.

TWIDDLE DEE AND SOMETHING ELSE

A review of the prevailing polarization hanging over the current national political scene cannot be complete without addressing how that level of division is affecting the political parties – the Democratic and Republican Parties.  According to the journalist Ezra Klein,[1] covering that scene, especially from the perspective one gets in the nation’s capital, has fundamentally changed since the year Klein moved to Washington in 2005.

          Highlighting the work of Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, a pair of political scientists who usually work at a liberal think-tank, in the case of Mann, and a conservative think-tank, in the case of Ornstein, Klein reports that the duo became popular for their balanced, combined reporting.  They usually shared their findings and interpretations of polling information.  But of late, they find their jobs overly challenging in that while they are balanced, their “beat” became imbalanced.

          In their 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, they give their readers a sense of how imbalanced the political landscape had become.

Today’s Republican Party … is an insurgent outlier.  It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government.  The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government’s role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties.  This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for “balance,” constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.[2]

While this blog avoids reporting, much less portraying a partisan stand, a review of polarization cannot avoid making observations about the current divide between the nation’s major political parties.  The closest it can sustain its impartial commitment is to share what these “balanced” political scientists have found.

          Yet, their findings, indicated by the above quote, cast the two as “controversial” by the prevailing media outlets and, Klein reports, they found themselves not being invited to the Sunday shows, such as Meet the Press.  But their book warned their audience of how extreme things were becoming.  And with the subsequent election of Trump to the presidency four years later, their warning had substance.  At least, that is how Klein casts Mann and Ornstein’s cautious tale.

          In another publication, the conservative, Ornstein, further warned how this polarization was being manifested in the outerings of GOP congress members, Tea Party radicals, and the inability of more moderate voices in the Republican Party to co-opt the more extreme actors.  In sum, the party was teed up to accept and promote Trump.

          By comparing the two major candidates in 2016, it provides one a clear distinction of what the divide looked like.  Trump expressed contempt of established norms, threatened to lock up opponents, and espoused or was friendly toward conspiracy theories and their advocates.  Hillary Clinton and her party didn’t engage in these sorts of broadsides.  One is left with the question:  if the above is true, why is it so?  Why does this divide exist in presidential and Congressional politics, at least to this degree?

          Here, this writer finds it helpful to review a model he has utilized more than once in this blog.  That is a model that E. E. Schattschneider describes in his book, The Semi-Sovereign People.[3]  It is a simple model that makes a lot of sense.  It basically reflects the commonsensical notion that if one is winning a competition and expects to win, one is unmotivated to seek and secure help from other parties.  Afterall, if one is going win, why share the spoils?

          Obviously, if one is in a disadvantaged position, relative to the opposition, one is motivated to seek help and usually that means seeking out and establishing relationships with other relatively weak competitors of other competitive situations.  While winning will probably mean sharing the spoils, successful partnerships promise the possibility of winning not just for oneself, but, as a result of reciprocity, for those partners in their competitive struggles.

          An example of the former situation is a large corporation, say the oil industry, doesn’t need help in advancing and protecting its interests.  Usually, through the common practice of campaign donations and lobbying, it seems to fair quite well.  It doesn’t actively seek help from, say, the tech industry.  Each moneyed interest minds its own affairs and happily enjoys the fruits of its own victories.  Of course, the isolation is not a hundred percent. 

For one thing, it needs the support of a political party.  And that party is the one that associates itself with business interests, the Republican Party.  It generally advances policies that honor, if not promote, this isolation by opposing, among other things, government intrusions. That would especially apply to the markets, such as with regulations.

On the other hand, there is the side, represented by the Democratic Party, that does seek alliances among the weaker actors.  They include such groups as civil rights organizations, labor organizations, environmental organizations, organizations established to protect and advance public services like public schools, etc. 

One main attribute that this side has is that, by just counting heads, they have far more people to draw on as potential members or allies and as voters.  There are far more people with meager resources than there are who have an abundance of resources, especially financial resources.

But there are other interests, outside of money, that influence how people see their political choices.  There are, for example, religious interests or there are feelings concerning race or feelings concerning one’s nation.  And here is what Klein identifies as the main motivating force behind what propels polarization, i.e., identity in its various forms.

This is this writer’s interpretation:  the political party that lacks appeal in the general population when solely considering economic questions, has to make up that deficiency by catering to people in other realms of interests.  That motivates the decision-makers of that side, that party, to cater to other natural drives, such as those that reflect the concerns over identity. 

Usually, if one analyzes the language of that side one finds craftily formulated messaging.  Effective combatants – those within that side’s political party – use an appeal to identity, in some form, and that appeal lies below the surface.

Why this subterfuge?  Because appealing to identity, by its nature, smacks in the face of the espoused national theory that Americans hold about themselves, i.e., the support for equality.  Advancing one’s identity group, say race, to the expense of another – especially when it comes to public policy – deprives, to some degree, equal accessibility to resources that public policy should extend to all individuals, say educational opportunities.

A concrete example in the nation’s history and even today, is unequal access to these opportunities.  And the policies that promote this unequal access need to be hidden to some extent by coming up with all sorts of qualifiers especially after the federal government enacted the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s.  Examples are funding school policies or requirements for teacher certification. 

This general strategy, though, has become more and more difficult to maintain.  Therefore, the efforts have become less and less subtle.  The result is two-fold:  more targeted policies that in effect limit equality and the use of language that has become less coded and more direct.

Given the above, certain consequences come into play.  Klein writes,

Democrats [those of the weaker-actors’ party] have an immune system of diversity and democracy.  The Republican Party doesn’t.  This has not left the Democrats unaffected by the forces of polarization, to be sure.  But if polarization has given the Democratic Party the flu, the Republican Party has caught pneumonia.[4]

It seems that this once subtle strategy has gotten out of hand, it has metastasized.  This, in turn, has disrupted the political arena and by doing so, has endangered the general array of political norms and values.  Polarization is dangerous and might threaten the American way of politics that has sustained its democratic institutions for over two centuries.  More on this to come.

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[1] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press, 2020).

[2] Ibid., 226.

[3] E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People:  A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (New York, NY:  Hole, Rinehart and Winston, 1960).

[4] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized, 229.

A TRUE SELF IMAGE?

 

Polarization, a bedeviling state of affairs affecting the current American political scene, has been attributed to a sense of identity.  The journalist Ezra Klein makes that connection in his book, Why We’re Polarized?[1]  And no aspect of identity is more intensely felt then when it comes to racism, the bugaboo of the American story.

The social scientific work that has been most linked to the study of this problem – the scholarly study that painted this problem’s broad implications – is An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal.[2]  That two-volume work (over a thousand pages) has, through the years, had an enormous influence on public policy especially during the Johnson Administration.  But as the years have gone by, one of the work’s central – albeit unproven – thesis has been subjected to increasing criticism.

That criticism, if true, gets at explaining a central motivating force feeding the current polarization; but that is getting ahead of the story.  Myrdal in his work – and that of his extensive team of social scientists that combed the South to acquire the raw data upon which his study was based – assumed that Americans had/have a set of richly espoused values and supporting beliefs in an American Creed.

That creed has been composed of certain substantive qualities; those being liberty, justice, and equality that would be demonstrated by extending fair opportunity to everyone.  This, in turn, casts Americans as being a moral people harboring a moral consciousness of the realities that runs counter to this creed. 

Yet, his study documented the obvious and extensive realities African Americans experienced in their daily lives within the area of study, that of the South.  That existence was characterized by a social/political/economic existence that resembled nothing approaching liberty, justice, and/or equality.

All Americans needed to do to become unconflicted with this “dilemma” was to stop discriminating against blacks, which the study proposed was the main cause of that minority population’s deplorable conditions.  Maribel Morey writes,

As he prepared the final manuscript, Myrdal collected countless studies and memoranda illustrating the leading role of racial discrimination in creating racial differences in the United States.  He commissioned original memoranda from over forty leading social scientists on topics including racial stereotyping, patterns of racial segregation, and black labor.[3]

Under the current state, many question this self-imaging many Americans seem to have about the type of people they are.

          The primary cause for the state of race relations to this day, some would argue, is not so much a lack of living out one’s espoused values.  The disease is more entrenched.  To have a viable ongoing issue in a viable polarized state of political affairs, one needs a significantly established set of beliefs that counter this higher “moral” character.  Why did Myrdal, a sophisticated, “impartial” foreigner not see what many today judge to be obvious?

One can look at Myrdal and the individual situation he and his wife were experiencing during the development of this work to understand potential ulterior motives or biases for the slant the final product took.  They were Swedes in America while Nazi Germany was imposing its unspeakable crimes on Europe – but that’s another story.  Leave it to suggest that the Myrdals wanted to project a more humane image of America that could more boldly counter that of Germany.

          What is relevant here is that this higher moral view of the American psyche underestimated the strength and united commitment by many to allow the wrongs being imposed on blacks.  It seems to have missed the strengths of senses of right and wrong that went counter to this alleged noble democratic creed.  And this was not just in the South but in the North and West also.  Evidence?  Well, one need only look at the state of blacks in the ensuing years until today.

          Yes, there have been improvements, but are they of the degree to prove what Myrdal postulated?  Morey quotes Yale sociologist, Maurice Davie, “Though the treatment of the Negro is without doubt the greatest challenge to American democracy, the conscience of white America does not appear to be as aware and disturbed as Myrdal thinks it is from the rational moral standpoint.”[4]  And she further reports on the work of Ernest Campbell.

          That work tested Myrdal’s assumption on three-hundred Southern university students.  He found that this “moral,” deep-seated disposition is not passed on to significant numbers of people when it comes to dealing with people of another race.  “Further, a segregated system provides its own set of counter-norms, a rationale, that justifies the system while it helps the actor in the system to compartmentalize or re-interpret the American Creed.”[5]  One, so affected, senses no resulting contradiction, therefore, he/she feels no angst over the obvious state of incongruency.

          What this current state of polarization has done, a message earlier stated in this blog, is to help lay bare this incubation of a problem – in this case stemming from such rationalizing or sustaining a “moral” view that justifies the inequality in the treatment of blacks.  But what is worse? 

Is it a belief that Americans will ultimately not tolerate inequality and champion a fix – i.e., that ends discriminatory practices – or is it this rationalization or counter value system?  If one believes the fix will inevitably come, to be successful, one is in effect ignoring an opposition that finds segregation as either irrelevant or in line with the nation’s basic principles.

          That is, the Myrdal assumption underestimates the challenge.  What seems to be needed are extensive conversations over basic attitudes, values, and dispositions that in a polarized atmosphere seems well beyond what is possible.  Yet, what better atmosphere to start these basic discussions than in civics classrooms that impart a curriculum favoring the federation of its citizens of all races, ethnicities, gender, ages, etc.?

There, in those classrooms, one can hold sacred an American Creed as defined by Myrdal but understands there are competing images about what Americanism should be.  This blogger would add it is not enough to identify the gap between the creed Myrdal identifies and competing images of another American value system, but that the sought-after image needs to be fuller and more comprehensive of the forces at play. 

There needs be a reasoned rationale for the creed’s existence, as one offered by federation theory.  And pedagogically, that should lead to a developed content and instructional processes to handle the entailed challenge, not in an accusatorial tone, but one that invites inclusion.

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[1] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press).

[2] Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, NY:  Harper and Brothers, 1944).

[3] Meribel Morey, “Are Americans Really Champions of Racial Equality?”  The Atlantic (April 12, 2015), accessed August 10, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/are-americans-champions-of-racial-equality/389826/ .

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

CATEGORIZING TO A FAULT

        

Over a number of postings, this blog has shared with readers the thoughts of various writers on those factors that contribute to the existence and strength of tribal thinking.  The purpose has been to shed light for the benefit of civics educators and other interested parties of the detrimental effects a polarized political landscape has on the promotion of good citizenship.  This posting continues that effort.  It attempts to turn the attention of readers to a related natural, psychological tendency humans have.  

It turns out, humans have a strong natural bias that encourages tribalism.  An early writer who presented a cogent argument regarding this human disposition is cognitive linguist, George Lakoff.[1]  He points out that it is natural and functional for people to conceptualize – that is, to form categories – in their attempts to make sense of reality.  Without that ability, the mind would be overcome by all the factual bits of information a person encounters. 

Categorizing allows one to make “information boxes” in which perceived information can be organized.  But following the tradition set down by Aristotle, people seek definite definitions for those categories or concepts, and this is problematic.  Why?  Reality is not that conducive to being defined in such a definite way or to such a definite degree.  Lakoff, in effect, complains that this practice leads to thinking and speaking pattern that assumes sharp distinctions within and among the meanings of those categories and usually those distinctions are not justified. 

The problem is that reality is simply not so simple.  And no area of interest is this truer than when one considers human behaviors, roles, expectations, attitudes, knowledge, or values.  In previous postings, this blog has argued that the inability of the social sciences to replicate the successes of the natural sciences has to do with the number of variables affecting human behavior.   One of those postings made the comparison to trying to predict the weather. 

Adding to the number of factors involved is the practical limitation posed by this overwhelming challenge to define those factors, variables, or concepts – what do those boxes mean?  Take any category, say one dealing with roles, and see if one can clearly, unambiguously define it?  For example, “boss” or “manager” can be simply defined as one who supervises those under his/her authoritative responsibility.  But can a boss be a mentor, a father/mother figure, a friend, an enemy, a rival, or ride to work? 

And as that person fulfills one or more of these functions, does that affect his/her bossing behavior?  Add to that the methodological practice in the sciences to reduce analysis of those variables under study, one can see how this abstraction can be problematic. 

[Idealizations] are never visible in pure form, but are no less real for all that.  No one has ever actually sighted a triangle without thickness, a frictionless plane, a point mass, an ideal gas, or an infinite, randomly interbreeding population.  That is not because they are useless figments but because they are masked by the complexity and finiteness of the world and by many layers of noise.  The concept of “mother” [or “boss”] is perfectly well defined within a number of idealized theories.[2]

So, as one can see, this ailment hinders all sciences and is part and parcel of reductionism.

          Of course, this is not an argument to do away with scientific methods or conceptualizing, but to hold them with some reservation or nuance.  And further, short of the higher standards of scientific thinking, in everyday thinking that people practice, this problem is further magnified.  That is, the human tendency to put things – really ideas of things – into boxes has its shortcomings especially as humans tend to fall in love with those boxes.  Afterall, that’s how they see things. 

On another level, one can call them stereotypes and those can be based on a variety of types.  Of most relevance to the topic of polarization is racism, but there are other types.  There is sexism, xenophobia, agism, and now there is even “maskism.”  Oh, if one wears a mask during the pandemic, one must be a Commie.  This tendency feeds the beliefs underlying the motivational forces that leads one to be on one side of the polarizing divide or the other.

Steven Pinker identifies this stereotyping as a “bug” in one’s cognitive or mental software.  And here is a common line of thinking that bolsters the unreasonable results that such thinking generates.  One might observe a correlation – when X happens, Y happens – and, therefore, either X causes Y or the other way around.

Yes, there can even be statistical verification for the results that a stereotype promotes.  Negative examples of this can be cited, but to make the point, a positive example is better.  It turns out that people from high income families are much more likely to attain higher educational degrees.[3]  X can be income and Y can be education.  Therefore, being well-off causes a person to develop those attributes that lead to acquiring higher levels of education.

Is one justified to form the conclusion that since Mr. X is from a higher income family, he, therefore, will attain a higher degree?  No, that would be unreasonable (yet rational).  It is attributing a group characteristic to an individual.  It also conflates various factors that interact to cause the cited result that might not exist in a person or a subgroup within the overall population of those who represent one or the other factor or both. 

Now, one can apply these unreasonable qualities to any stereotype and if one considers the above nuances, ignoring them can generate beliefs that have led to tragic consequences.  If one reviews the arguments of hate groups, this is the type of thinking that leads them to believe in the negative characteristics they attribute to minorities and further are used to justify their hateful activities usually aimed at individuals.  It undermines swaths of people from being able to be accorded their rightful level of integrity.

On this point, Pinker writes,

But sadly, some stereotypes may be based on good statistics about real people. … Ordinary people’s estimates of these differences are fairly accurate, and in some cases, people with more contact with a minority group … have more pessimistic, and unfortunately more accurate, estimates of the frequency of negative traits such as illegitimacy and welfare dependency. … [A]ctuarially sound but morally repugnant decisions about individual cases [are made].  This behavior is racist [for example] not because it is irrational (in the sense of statistically inaccurate) but because it flouts the moral principle that it is wrong to judge an individual using the statistics of a racial or ethnic group.[4]

And more than likely, the true causes of any positive or negative attributes are misidentified by using the most obvious correlations.  Wealth, in itself, does not “cause” intellectual prowess, but it does afford the attaining of those factors that do.  Race or foreign ethnicity does not cause crime, but poverty and its related conditions do and unfortunately too many members of minority groups are denied the opportunities that lead to acquiring higher income levels.

          So, in sum, humans tend to categorize – it makes life easier, at least in the immediate situation.  Unfortunately, these categories tend to be poorly defined.  People also grow emotionally attached to those categories especially if they are attained during formative years and are associated with other symbolic elements of one’s life like family, ethnic group, geographic area, educational institutions, sports teams, etc. 

          Using those categories, in the form of concepts or factors and variables, one can form cause and effect relationships, but since they tend to be poorly defined, they also are the source of poor theorizing, i.e., inaccurate cause and effect statements.  And even if there is statistical verification of some correlational relationship, one can be led to inaccurate conclusions that promote unjustifiable treatment of fellow Americans or of foreign populations, especially as the relationships are applied to individuals and subgroups.

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[1] George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1987).

[2] Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), 312 (Kindle version).

[3] Nick Morrison, “Higher Education Gap between Rich and Poor Reaches 10-Year High,” Forbes (December 17, 2019), accessed August 6, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2019/12/17/higher-education-gap-between-rich-and-poor-reaches-10-year-high/#6c8b09fc749a .

[4] Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, 313 (emphasis in the original).

THE MEANING OF “UNUM,” Part III

The last two postings presented the essence of Arthur M. Schlesinger’s argument[1] bolstering an assimilationist approach to immigration policy.  This was described in counter position to a multiculturalist approach, especially as expressed by critical theorists.  According to that historian, the multicultural position would have immigrants rejecting the central American culture – one which is based on Western cultural tradition – and be able to maintain their various cultural modes of behavior and belief structures in defining their social and private affairs.

Schlesinger sees this as depriving the nation of a central cultural base which if maintained would serve to functionally establish basic expectations in social intercourse.  Rounding his argument, he reviews a list of attributes an alignment to a single, Western culturally based tradition should have.

First, that tradition is/will not be a solidified orthodoxy but more of a cultural process by which the effects of incoming traditions of current and future immigrants are incorporated into the dominant way of life.  “It is an ever-evolving philosophy, fulfilling its ideals through debate, self-criticism, protest, disrespect, and irreverence; a tradition in which all have right of heterodoxy and opportunities for self-assertion.”[2]

Second, to acknowledge the essentially European origins of the American culture as, one, a historical fact, and, two, an origin that allows – Schlesinger seems to say invites – for the acceptance and accommodation of various cultural traditions.  It does not disdain other traditions but allows for evolving views – a one step at a time – of acceptance and selected adaptation of beliefs, values, attitudes, and styles from non-European traditions.

Third, a cultural commitment not based on the notion that it is better for all humans, but better for the American people.  It is history that has given this nation this tradition and that does not just mean an accidental fact, but a fact that has a complicated, extensive, and thorough defining effect on the American people.  In short, it provides the nation its identity.

Fourth, a central commitment to a political culture that is not based on group rights, as multicultural arguments seem to bolster, but based on a foundational commitment to protect and advance individual integrity through a respect for individual rights as defined by the Bill of Rights, the rule of law, and democratic processes.  This is further advanced by a cultural disposition toward communal arrangements of social settings, from families to national and international associations.

And fifth, that cultural tradition provides reasonable expectations that in terms of any multilayered reality – which includes any reality of any consequence – allows for necessary efficiencies.  For example, as William K. Tabb points out, economic health depends on economic actors having some level of a predictive ability and be able to share general views about how the economy functionally works.[3]

All this poses a challenge for the nation to hit upon the optimal compromise between the nationalist bias toward exclusion of non-Western influences and the multiculturalist bias toward prohibiting efforts at enculturating the nation’s population to Western based cultural norms and standards.  This compromise needs happen to maintain and strengthen a true republic.

Our task is to combine due appreciation of the splendid diversity of the nation with due emphasis on the great unifying Western ideas of individual freedom, political democracy, and human rights.  These are the ideas that define American nationality – and today empower people of all continents, races, and creeds.[4]

And another quote; this one from an account of Abraham Lincoln’s last journey – his body being transported back to Springfield, Illinois – by the historian, Ted Widmer,

[The American people] trusted Lincoln’s vision of an America that aspired to keep the promises of the Declaration of Independence.  Even if they had lost him, they knew that “the Union is not assassinated,” as Whitman put it.  They were not naïve; they knew that the Declaration set a difficult standard, one that they would often fail to reach.  But to pretend it did not exist was to slowly become a different kind of country, with no moral standard at all.[5]

And that Declaration was a product of a long development of the Western tradition.

          This writer has indicated in prior postings that he accepts the basis of Schlesinger’s argument but takes issues with its finer points.  The argument rightly points out the dysfunctionality of a nation with disparate cultural traditions – beyond that of what Canada has with its dual cultural base between its British and French traditions – made up of cultural elements from around the world.  But this blogger feels he soft-peddles the lack of effort Americans have made to live up to its federalist values.

          The Widmer quote above mentions the difficult standard the Declaration sets for the American people, but how divergent does the record have to be before one just considers that proclaimed set of values as just a pile of words?  In a current issue of The Atlantic, Ed Young[6] points out how the current pandemic has laid bare the inequalities that exist.

And much of that inequality, in terms of occurrence, can be superimposed on the racial and ethnic divisions of the nation.  Yes, poverty is the culprit but if that poverty aligns inordinately along racial and ethnic lines, then one can readily see the implied inequality reflecting a less than enculturated commitment to the nation’s own stated principles and values.  Young writes, 

Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a “great equalizer,” the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nation’s history. …

 Of the 3.1 million Americans who cannot afford health insurance, more than half are people of color, and 30 percent are Black.  This is no accident.  In the decades after the Civil War, the white leaders of former slave states deliberately withheld care from Black Americans, apportioning medicine more according to the logic of Jim Crow than Hippocrates.  They built hospitals away from Black communities, segregated Black patients into separate wings, and blocked Black students from medical school.  In the 20^th century, they helped construct America’s system of private, employer-based insurance, which has kept many Black people from receiving adequate medical treatment …

A number of former slave states also have among the lowest investment in public health, the lowest quality of medical care, the highest proportion of Black citizens, and the greatest racial divides in health outcomes. …

As of the early July, one in every 1,450 Black Americans had died from COVID-19 – a rate more than twice that of white Americans.[7]

Young goes on to point out a set of data points that adequately support the claim that minorities are not treated as white Americans when it comes to health care.

One can easily draw the conclusion that Americans are not meeting the “difficult standard” the Declaration of Independence stakes out.  That is, any meaningful definition of “Unum” demands more.

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[1] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America:  Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1992).

[2] Ibid., 136.

[3] William K. Tabb, The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time (New York, NY:  Columbia University Press, 2012).

[4] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America, 138.

[5] Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge:  Thirteen Days to Washington (New York, NY:  Simon and Schuster, 2020), 461.

[6] Ed Young, “How the Pandemic Defeated America,” The Atlantic (September 2020).

[7] Ibid., accessed August 4, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-american-failure/614191/ .